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Mass protests have raged since the global financial crisis of 2008. Across the world students and workers and environmentalists are taking to the streets. Discontent is seething even in the wealthiest countries, as the world saw with Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Protest Inc. tells a disturbingly different story of global activism. As millions of grassroots activists rally against capitalism, activism more broadly is increasingly mirroring business management and echoing calls for market-based solutions. The past decade has seen nongovernmental organizations partner with oil companies like ExxonMobil, discount retailers like Walmart, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, and brand manufacturers like Nike and Coca-Cola. NGOs are courting billionaire philanthropists, branding causes, and turning to consumers as wellsprings of reform.

Are “career” activists selling out to pay staff and fund programs? Partly. But far more is going on. Political and socioeconomic changes are enhancing the power of business to corporatize activism, including a worldwide crackdown on dissent, a strengthening of consumerism, a privatization of daily life, and a shifting of activism into business-style institutions. Grassroots activists are fighting back. Yet, even as protestors march and occupy cities, more and more activist organizations are collaborating with business and advocating for corporate-friendly “solutions.” This landmark book sounds the alarm about the dangers of this corporatizing trend for the future of transformative change in world politics.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A gloomy, gripping, book, full of disheartening statistics. The essential message of the book is pretty clear - 'the rich are winning'."The Ecologist

"A tremendous book - hard-hitting, passionate, and beautifully written - that deserves to be read by everyone who is interested in social change. The authors investigate how corporate values and behaviors are weakening the impact of global citizen action. We must heed their call."Michael Edwards, Demos, New York, and editor of Transformation

"This original and compelling book provides a much needed wake-up call about the creeping de-radicalizing influence of big business on activism in the contemporary world."Michael Maniates, Professor of Social Sciences, Yale-NUS, Singapore

"Speaking the truth to power risks leaving you with the truth and them with the power. Much as the corporate model of organizing production affects and infects so much else in modern society, this fine analysis shows how it has done the same to many of its social critics."Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts

About the Author

Peter Dauvergne is professor of international relations at the University of British Columbia, and author of the bestselling The Shadows of Consumption (2008), which received the Gerald L. Young Book Award in Human Ecology.

Genevieve LeBaron is Vice-Chancellor's Fellow in politics at the University of Sheffield.

Top customer reviews

Protest Inc. by Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve Lebaron examines the corporatization of the activism in modern society. They insightfully point out that this process is not a “simple business take-over of activism”, but an example of capitalism’s power to slowly assimilate activism through the silencing of criticism and dissent. To support their argument, they highlight three processes that exemplify this trend: The securitization of dissent, the privatization of social life, and the institutionalization of activism.

The authors look at various organizations, including the US Nature Conservancy, Greenpeace, and WWF, to show increasing interaction between markets and activism. Why? Because, in the capitalist model a noticeable, distinctive brand is important. You are likely to be noticed more if you have a memorable or honorable name, and are allied to a world-wide famous corporation. The problem with this partnership, they argue, is that it legitimizes the carbon footprint of corporations, as well as the increasing economic inequality that is pervasive in the United States.

Despite its grim subject matter the book is not an indictment of activism. The authors recognize how different forms of activism are important, and have been successful in the past. Their goal is to highlight an “overall trend….where the agendas, discourse, questions, and proposed solutions of human rights, gender equality, social justice, animal rights, and environmental activist organizations increasingly conform with, rather than challenge, global capitalism.”

Most writing about non-governmental organizations, "global civil society" and popular protest sees these groups as playing a progressive, democratizing role, in contrast to privatizing and deregulating government policies and to the power of transnational corporations. Dauvergne and Lebaron shatter these illusions by pointing out how these groups not only are captured by business and government, but also mimic neoliberal approaches themselves. This critique is analogous to the critiques 50 years ago in the public policy field of the analysis of pressure and interest groups, where special interests came to be seen paradoxically as undermining rather than strengthening pluralism. Today, without effective ways of counteracting neoliberal hegemony, these groups are condemned to are reinforcing it.

Greenpeace began in 1970 as a wildcat protest against nuclear tests in the North Pacific. Forty-some years later, Greenpeace has a corporate charter, a CEO, an investment portfolio, and strict rules preventing grassroots members from going off-script. Dauvergne and LeBaron boldly question: what costs do change agents pay by organizing along a capitalist corporate model? The answers they uncover are harrowing, but not particularly unexpected.

Though they return to the Greenpeace example periodically, our authors take an expansive view of organized activism. Many formerly radical groups have adopted structures modeled on Fortune 500 companies, including well-paid executive boards and diverse, aggressive investment strategies. This includes sinking donor money into capitalist enterprises, and permitting large-scale donors to demand "return on investment" for putatively philanthropic giving. Whether this facilitates real, fundamental change, matters little to paid leaders.

Corporatized charities thus become beholden to money and other status quo influences. Rather than demanding actual systemic, radical changes (radical, from Latin: root), corporate charities accept superficial changes while letting underlying conditions fester unchanged. Bigness, briefly, encourages activist schizophrenia. Groups like Greenpeace, World Vision, and Amnesty International promise revolution to street-level members, while essentially appeasing their corporate and government allies. Activists buy into the system they claim to oppose.

Dauvergne, a Canadian, and LeBaron, from Britain, come from political science backgrounds, but we'd more accurately call this book political philosophy. They have distinct ideas about what charities, NGOs, and other activist groups should do: such organizations should resist crushing forces of wealth, power, and cozy arrogance. And they perceive their beloved change agents failing in their tasks. Thus their book mixes manifesto, goad, and plan of action.

While large-scale corporate charities essentially sell themselves to "crony capitalism," governments and private security forces increasingly treat rank-and-file protesters as terrorists. Nor is that an exaggeration: since 9/11, government documents openly characterize environmentalists, labor organizers, and urban monks as equal to al-Qaeda. Violence has become the first resort in handling demonstrators. The NYPD, with FBI connivance, used military tactics and technology to disperse #Occupy encampments.

This dualism has chilling effects--literally, as citizen passions dissipate. Large, essentially conformist groups get corporate and government assistance, including both manpower and money. Actual dissidents and True Believers can expect arrest, or worse. Thus the very principles of democracy, including Constitutional American guarantees of free speech and assembly, become hallmarks of outlaw insurgents; law-keepers violently terminate unauthorized but completely legal public gatherings. Demanding answers from elected officials becomes criminal.

Our authors never quite say it, but when wholly legal protests get treated as "national security issues," governments essentially declare their people enemies of the state. This changes the very foundations of Western civic authority. Protecting the charitable-industrial complex while silencing civilian dissent, governments redefine us as customers, not citizens. We're free to buy and spend, whether altruistically or selfishly; but we're banned from questioning our government and corporate overlords.

Though the authors dance around the topic, they essentially confirm one of my pet issues: bigness and bureaucracy cause complacence. Small, community-level movements retain vigor. As they describe the push-pull between transnational, corporatized "charities" and grassroots protesters, Dauvergne and LeBaron describe the true movement of civic authority: leaders would concentrate power at the top. But real activists can re-channel energy by where they dedicate their loyalties.

Real citizenship requires every citizen's active, informed involvement. Turning the impetus for change over to corporate charities has proven as numbing as entrusting such authority to governments or capitalists. Dauvergne and LeBaron demonstrate how free Western nations have lost the compass of true democracy; but we can reclaim our direction by exercising our wits, numbers, and legitimate citizenship. It's never all lost; sometimes we just forget our own power.